I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
Google.com/haydn

It’s two months now since I dumped my mobile phone. Some people continue to ask why I bothered while two others offered to buy me a new one, to reduce the inconvenience for them. Tempting! The reason why I bother to live without a mobile phone is it represents a new experience, something I can fold into my personal innovation lifestyle.

The personal innovation lifestyle is, I believe, the most important concept we can work with as employees, entrepreneurs or social beings. Not having a mobile sits alongside my annual forays into seaweed collection for my garden in the portfolio of things I do differently. This is the age of hyperinnovation and just like you needed a personal brand 20 years ago, you need now to think through your personal innovation lifestyle and the commitments, contributions and rewards it entails.

Having no smartphone does two things for me immediately. First, it allows me to reflect on connectivity – in fact the phone is not the end game in the global connectivity race.

Connectivity is meant to give me three things: access to my strong ties when I need it; access to weak ties that I can use to develop my business and lifestyle goals; and access to a wide array of data that allows me to make better decisions. Right now the smartphone doesn’t do all of these things, and I doubt it will. It is not the access point I need.

The second thing that dumping the phone gives me is time to think, distance from the consequences of decisions I’ve already made and that I am dealing with. I can’t plan my personal innovation lifestyle without this distance and time.

A week or so back I had a message from an old friend who said “I’m still looking for that all important inflexion point in business and in life.” You probably know how he feels.

The point I wanted to make to my friend is: You are too busy on your iPhone to recognise the inflection points around you. They are there and we need to step back and take cognisance of them. We are in a moment in history where we experiencing the pressure and enjoying the luxury of asking how our society and economy should evolve.

Just as Liam Halligan wrote recently that America is sleepwalking to disaster, I sense many of us are connecting to the wrong arguments, basing our decisions on insights that mattered yesterday.

I am in an intellectual world dominated by technology, rather than a human in a political world seeking to maximise the benefits of technology. The realities that are suppressing living standards, and encouraging people to turn away from building a greater future together, are not directly related to technology – but for as long as connectivity is our passion we don’t stop long enough to work out why we are fading from power and influence.

The single biggest influence on my life is the ability of the Chinese entrepreneurial system to create a version of the western industrial model and to do it bigger, better, cheaper.

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BRAVO! Well said. You are on to something now. If you study the causes of the collapse of ancient powerful societies you will find that there is A LOT in common between them and our modern American society. Distractions, I will call them, are causing people to ignore vital issues that are beginning to plague us.

For one, WE NEED OUR JOBS BACK! We need to place factories stateside to produce some of the materials that we are buying from overseas. Set up tech-support calling centers here instead of whoring out all the jobs to India.

Yes, I understand why we do it. I understand that corporations can save a lot of dough because the masses in some of these other countries are willing to work for practically nothing. But we are headed for doom if we continue on in our current path or unrighteous indolence.

Brilliant article! If only more people could look up from their computer/smartphone screens and ponder/reflect a little.

[...] Why I Dumped My Smartphone – 2 Months Into Building My Personal Innovation Lifestyle It’s two months now since I dumped my mobile phone. Some people continue to ask why I bothered while two others offered to buy me a new one, to reduce the inconvenience for them. Tempting! The reason why I bother to live without a mobile phone is it represents a new experience, something I can fold into my personal innovation lifestyle. Read more on Forbes [...]

Haydn, many years ago, while I was studying communication in Stevens Point Wisconsin as an undergrad when asked why I didn’t have a TV or a newspaper subscription I was quoted as saying, “I have cut myself off from The Media”, meaning a purposeful decision not to be whipped into a frenzy by “news.” Your article reminded me of this choice. Of course I was viciously accused of being lazy by a friend who is now a successful political cartoonist. (checkout the artist known as “Kirk”) I refuse to comment on the veracity of that accusation.

Today I live in Japan and I purposely ignore Japanese media. I find that by watching the BBC I am not under the spell of propaganda. Propaganda only works if you belong to the intended audience.

I have found the following ideas to be the best recipe for me to achieve Media freedom without doing a full blown Media fast.

1. I choose to watch news from a different local (if in Tokyo, watch CNN, except in case of radiation contamination, then watch the BBC.) 2. I turn off the TV at the dinner table and ask my wife about her day. Then, if time allows I tell her about mine. 3. My wife likes to read the news out loud. This is a very relaxing way to get my news, pre-filtered by someone I love. 4. For the most part, news is not useful and therefore a waste of time to me. If I wanted useful news, I want to know the reflection of the murder or accident in my neighborhood. Is it trending up? Compared to what? News doesn’t give me this context, and therefore is not useful to me. Books and magazines on the other hand give me depth and allow me to think.

These choices I use to further improve my quality of life:

5. I schedule phone time. I like to call people when I can visit. I also like to be present when they call. I turn off my phone when I am busy. 6. I schedule email time. Why is email any different than regular mail? 7. I live close to work and bike, but don’t take the fasted route, take the scenic route. 8. I schedule myself so that I arrive at least 15 if not 30 minutes early. This gives me huge piece of mind. 9. I like to have routines. Routines give me time to think, because I don’t have to spend time looking for my keys.

Thank you for giving me the impetus to review this part of my life and share it with you.

Hi Japan expert, and thanks for sharing. I don’t think I have your level of self discipline but I do share your anxiety that we are losing site of the things that matter. I’ve also been very surprised by how many people have read this piece and that when I talk to people about this topic it strikes a chord – much more so than when people talked about computers having a negative impact.

A colleague of mine is proud of being hyperconnected. He´d die before missing a single news headline. The truth? Being connected and always busy helps him feel he´s achieving the day-to-day tasks of his job. Whatever that is.

To me the updates of states in Twitter and Facebook are like the you-have-a-new-email, in the 90s. That is: it takes a conscious move not to be caught in a sheer surprise about what the content of it will be. But whenever you as individual have clear interests about what your purpose in business and life is (my friend would not qualify here ;), I see those interruptions in the screen as sparks that pinch some parts of my brain. What someone would call innovation.